The Wall: Live in Los Angeles

Danica Leigh always wanted to see Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall performed live. But because the San Diego native — who spent time in Savannah, Ga.’s theater circuit before landing in Los Angeles last year — missed the 1980 concert tour and 1990s “Live in Berlin” reenactment, she never had the opportunity.

But Leigh, a seasoned puppet and specialty prop crafter, didn’t let that stop her, and what started last December as an idea for a Pink Floyd tribute night quickly evolved into her directing Los Angeles’ largest reenactment of the seminal concept album in 30 years.

With 55 performers — including a full cover band, a choir, a string quartet, a dance troupe and a stilt walker — who all volunteered their time to be a part of Jan. 30’s one-night-only charity event, The Wall: Live in Los Angeles is an ambitious presentation of the timeless work.

“I’m of the mind-set that, if I want to see something live, I might as well do it myself,” Leigh said.

Through 26 psychedelic tracks spread across a double album, The Wall tells the story of Pink, a rock star based on Pink Floyd founding member and lead songwriter Roger Waters, as he struggles with self-imposed isolation created by a metaphorical wall of emotion.

“It’s definitely one of the first border pieces that bridges the gap between rock ‘n’ roll and storytelling in a very direct way,” Leigh said.

The Wall’s strong narrative and sonic theatricality has long inspired grandiose visual adaptations, first as concert spectacle where a physical wall was erected between the band and the audience, then as an eponymous full-length film featuring cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s elaborate interpretations, but this incarnation started modestly enough.

Inspired by the album’s timeless emotional message and visual imagery that easily lends itself to theater, Leigh contacted fellow Floyd fan Tony Ferrara about helping her find musicians for a pet project she was planning to debut at the Unknown Theater in Hollywood.

“Originally, it was just going to be a lot of guest musicians playing through the various songs off the album,” Ferrara said. “We also wanted to find a way to coordinate a screening of the movie.”

But when Ferrara, a USC alumnus and guitarist for local funk band Big Lovin’ Panda, started to recruit his friends, he found that he and Leigh weren’t the only ones who had been moved by The Wall. He first asked fellow USC alumni Brett Morris and Sean Whalen, both of whom play for local Guns N’ Roses tribute band Chinese Democracy. Instead of agreeing to play one Pink Floyd song as asked, however, they demanded to play the entire album.

“My first thought was, ‘That’s really ambitious,’” Ferrara said. “But Danica is the kind of person who will go as big as possible.”

With several band members in place who already knew the entire album by heart, Leigh and Ferrara knew their pet-project tribute night deserved more than just a film screening. After deciding to make the event a benefit show, listings soon went up on Craigslist for keyboard players, bassists and actors.

The response from the local gig-seeking community was overwhelming.

Session musicians, sound engineers and full-time actors from all over the city replied with stories of deep attachment to the record and claims that they could play The Wall, note-for-note. Despite the lack of monetary compensation for the project, they were all more than willing to give up paying gigs to donate their time, knowledge and instruments to make it happen.

“One of the keyboard players scores films for a living, but when he was 16, he performed The Wall in its entirety with a four-track recorder and a mini Korg in a Chinese restaurant,” Ferrara said. “He’s been waiting for this his whole life.”

Within a week, the cover band of Ferrara’s friends had grown to include eight dedicated musicians — a mix of hobbyists and professionals who, theoretically, could recreate every manual and synthetic nuance of the 80-minute album.

Theory was proved true at the band’s first practice. The motley group of Wall devotees had never played together before, yet without hesitation they blazed through the entire first disc.

“It was remarkable,” Leigh explained. “I said, ‘Looks like I’m going to have to purchase some bricks and make a show.’”

They added a lead singer to play Pink, three professional dancers, a Cirque du Soleil stilt walker, a 16-voice choir and a string quartet whose parts were all arranged within the final week of rehearsals.

“The project outgrew itself very quickly,” Ferrara said.

While Ferrara tried to find a new venue that could fit the now 80-deep production crew (they eventually settled on the Ivy Substation in Culver City), Leigh made “bricks” by filling boxes with Braille manuscripts donated by a local recycling plant and constructed stage ornamentations based on Scarfe’s cartoons.

“From a technical standpoint, part of my initial draw to the project was the strong characters in animation that lend themselves to puppetry,” Leigh said.

But although she had every intention of creating large-scale puppets, the fact that the entire show was planned and executed in under two months put a huge time restriction on realizing her extravagant vision.

And although to the audience of the one-night-only performance it was a perfect multimedia masterpiece, Leigh and Ferrara acknowledge that the album provides material for so much more.

“It ended up being about 30 percent of what we wanted to do,” Ferrara said. “It was painful because the last week we had to assess what we had time for. There is so much more to the story and the show.”

More than any other rock opera of its time — including David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia — Pink Floyd’s The Wall has enjoyed relevance to multiple generations of listeners.

Its heavy themes — which rang true to initial audiences dealing with social and political isolation in a post-Vietnam War landscape — were empowering to those whose lives revolved around the literal wall separating East and West Berlin.

Today, however, Leigh and Ferrara see Pink’s isolation as a story relevant to a more modern problem — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder — and all proceeds from the night’s two performances went directly to the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that provides counseling for soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The Wall can easily be seen as a commentary on PTSD and an account of what it does,” Ferrara said. “There’s nothing like coming back to a community that has no idea what you’ve been through.”

Although The Wall: Live in Los Angeles only ran for one night, Leigh and Ferrara have hopes of taking their show to colleges and other venues, spreading the modern interpretation of an album that is both musically and visually powerful.

“It was kind of a pipe dream when we started,” Leigh said. “But when I first heard them play, I knew it had to be done.”